A political scientist by training, Dr. Cook was a staunch defender of all-black colleges and a crusader for interracial harmony, especially between blacks and Jews.

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At Dillard, he established a National Center for Black-Jewish Relations. He also increased student enrollment by 50 percent and started a Japanese-language curriculum.

Dr. Cook was born on Nov. 21, 1928, in Griffin, Ga., a city in metropolitan Atlanta. (His middle name was a tribute to Charles DuBois Hubert, a former president of the historically black Morehouse College in Atlanta.) His father, the Rev. Marcus Emanuel Cook, was a Baptist minister. His mother was the former Mary Beatrice Daniel.

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Mr. Cook in 1966 at Duke, where he taught political science until 1974.Credit
Duke University Archives

The summer after high school, Samuel Cook and his friend Martin Luther King Jr. were sent by their fathers, both preachers, to work in Connecticut’s tobacco fields to earn money for college. That fall, as precocious 15-year-old freshmen, they entered Morehouse under an early-admissions program aimed at filling classrooms emptied by students drafted for World War II.

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Dr. Cook married the former Sylvia Fields, who survives him along with their children, Samuel Jr. and Karen J. Cook; and two grandchildren.

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In 1948, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history from Morehouse, where he was student body president and founded the campus chapter of the N.A.A.C.P.

He earned a master’s (in political science) and a doctorate from Ohio State University. Dr. Cook taught at Southern University, in Baton Rouge, La.; Atlanta University; the University of Illinois; and the University of California, Los Angeles, before Duke hired him as an assistant professor of political science. His legacy there includes the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity.

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He and Dr. King remained in touch over the years. During the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott in 1956, he struck a hopeful note in a letter that began “Dear M. L.”

“My mind, heart and spirit go out to you and to all the others for heroic efforts in behalf of human dignity and freedom,” the letter said. “Freedom is not a gift but an achievement. Historically and morally speaking, it is the fruit of struggles, tragic failures, tears, sacrifices, and sorrow. Likewise, social changes, if more than accidental occurrences, if constitutive of moral goodness, are products of imaginative constructions and presuppose the will to make the ‘is’ conform to the ‘ought.’”

“The tragic lesson of American Negro history is not so much rooted in the activity of evil spirits but the inactivity of men of good will — in their willingness to yield instead of fulfill. Your activity and that of others similarly located reveal a radical departure, a new orientation.”

About a decade later, Dr. Cook replied more colloquially when asked by black students how to succeed.

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“Have a vision,” he replied, “a dream of success, and work like hell.”